Epic reviews

The negative reviews are correct; you are not being misled by bitter people wanting to spite Epic. They're trying to warn you. Turnover rate is over 10% per year. They brag about being below the average for "service industry", a demographic which includes restaurant/fastfood workers (very high turnover). 0.5 sick-days per month, including time spent for doctor's visits or therapy. You will be asked to stay late the day-of, forcing you into cancelling date plans or other social occasions with only a few hours' notice. More stressful than your most difficult college years. No work life balance; it's work-work balance. No paid maternity leave, no paid paternity leave. If you are sexually harassed by a developer, as a Quality Assurance person you are more replaceable than them and they will not be harshly disciplined. This stress will make any physical/mental genetic vulnerabilities present themselves from your previously pristine youthful personage. If you're not a college grad, they will not hire you. They hire college grads on the assumption that their lack of work experience means they will not know their workers' rights. Epic has been subject to multiple class action lawsuits for unpaid overtime for unskilled labor (Quality Assurance has settled once before, and are suing again now). Lower/Middle Management is college students who don't know any better, half the time. The upper management is people who haven't touched the actual Epic system in years so they've lost touch with the specifics of how hard a project concept will be to implement. Workplace dynamic mirrors that of high-school cliques; you better be part of the In-Crowd. The more popular kids will get the flashy projects, the unpopular ones will get thankless drudge-work. For Implementation Specialists (IS) at least (if not the other roles) they are told to fire the bottom 50% of employees every year, based on performance. Deadlines will be set arbitrarily by the Sales Team and as Quality Assurance you're the last step in the process, so any delays ahead of you will force you between a rock and a hard place of compromising testing quality for meeting the deadline. You will be blamed for if you miss a bug because of this time-crunch. You will be pressured into rubber-stamping something as "tested" even if you do not believe you had enough time to test. A project that took 5 months was initially planned to take 1 month. "Crunch period" is meaningless at Epic; every day is crunch time. At worst, your boss will be not more than a task-master, measuring quotas for how many bugs you've found. You will not get leadership from them on how to improve; you will only get pressure that you must improve.

- Aside from salary, the "benefits" are non-existent. It's 2015, and no self-respecting tech company should consider "Wear Jeans to Work" or "Free Coffee and Juice" as actual benefits but Epic does. The salary is very competitive for the position (essentially a glorified help desk), but that is counteracted by 1) the drudgery of the work you do, and 2) the fact that you are required to live in Madison. This would be like any other job, except at Staff Meetings you are continually reminded how the "benefits" are integral to the Epic Culture. If you take a second and look around, you will realize those "benefits" are really inconsequential. - Dead end career. If you're looking at the TS role, you likely graduated with a technical degree and can find more meaningful employment elsewhere. The TS role is essentially a help desk, where you field calls from analysts at different hospitals who are poorly trained and woefully unprepared for a career in IT. Your primary job function will be looking up things in manuals that your customers have access to, but are unwilling to read. There is occasionally a need to "dig in" to the codebase to track down actual software bugs, but that tends to be rare. You are a help desk employee, and that greatly limits your opportunities at and after Epic. - By and large, the management structure at Epic is awful. I was a Team Lead, and I've seen behind the scenes where people are promoted for technical skill without displaying the ability to effectively manage people or projects. New Team Leads attend one or two half-day leadership workshops at the UW campus, "read" some assigned books, and then they are put in charge of other's careers. The system of promotion and management is irresponsible and ultimately unmaintainable. Look at all of the critical reviews of Epic -- they all have a single thread in common, the poor management of employees and company culture. - Overall, the bubble of Electronic Medical Records in the US is popping. Epic has already sold to the meaningful consumers of this technology.. any organization in the US that doesn't currently use an EMR is being penalized by the government. This means you will be working for new customers who are just trying to meet the bare minimum to avoid penalties, not "change the world" like Epic would have you believe. This is an industry that is primed for a shake-up by some disruptive start-up that can manage to get HIPAA under control. You'll have a job for the next 5 years, but is it really the job you want? and what happens after that, if/when the bubble pops and your incredibly specialized skills developed maintaining a proprietary codebase on a dying programming language are no longer needed?